"pensieri a margine…"

My links of the week (weekly)

“A recent Harvard Business Review article noted that one Fortune 200 company took a week to generate and approve an 140-character tweet in response to a critic online — far too long to possibly be effective in the fast moving world of social media. Even if employees can collaborate more efficiently and effectively using social media tools, any impact will be minimal if they still need to navigate the old bureaucratic processes to leverage the results.”

A recent Harvard Business Review article noted that one Fortune 200 company took a week to generate and approve an 140-character tweet in response to a critic online — far too long to possibly be effective in the fast moving world of social media. Even if employees can collaborate more efficiently and effectively using social media tools, any impact will be minimal if they still need to navigate the old bureaucratic processes to leverage the results.

Consider the groundbreaking Super Bowl Tweet from Oreo during the football game’s unexpected blackout. As the Associated Press noted, “It took Oreo’s marketers roughly 10 minutes after the power went out to tweet a picture of an Oreo cookie in the half-dark with the words: ‘You can still dunk in the dark.’” (Read more at Wired.com.) What was most impressive were the organizational mechanisms in place — 18 months in the making — that allowed Oreo to create and post an on-message ad within minutes.

Rather, social businesses may start to look more like organizations that long predate modern corporations — so-called “loosely coupled” organizations such as military, education and religious institutions.

Loosely coupled institutions push decision-making capabilities down through their hierarchy to better deal with conditions on the ground. Executive leaders communicate the strategic objectives of the organization, and the front line leaders are partially responsible for figuring out how to achieve those objectives. These organizations remain deeply hierarchical, but these hierarchies operate differently than modern corporations.